Midwifery Today began as a magazine for midwives, birth practitioners, and parents. We later expanded to offer international and domestic conferences and educational reach through this website. We now offer online memberships, books, and e-books, as well as audios of past conference classes. All Toward Better Birth.
Learn what a Midwifery Today Online Membership can do for you. = Membership Article
quote
Be bold. Be proud. Persist in spreading the word that midwives are not only experts in normal birth, but also expert at keeping birth normal.
Judy Edmunds, CPM
quote
…in feeding babies, two substantial mammary glands are more useful than the two hemispheres of a professor’s brain.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
quote
Trauma always leaves a scar. It follows us home. It changes our lives. Trauma messes everybody up. But maybe that’s the point. All the pain and the fear and the crap. Maybe going through all that is what keeps us moving forward. It’s what pushes us. Maybe we have to get a little messed up, before we can step up.
Grey’s Anatomy
quote
“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”
Kofi Annan
quote
It was a natural consequence that all obstetric procedures had their indication widened as their relative safety became established. But that any operation, because asepsis makes it reasonably safe and anesthesia keeps the patient quiet during its performance, should be so inordinately broadened in its scope that the suspicion is evidence that it is being done for the convenience and conservation of time of the operator, is a travesty on scientific endeavor.
H. Schwarz, MD. 1919
My Winding Path to Midwifery by Sara Dunn When I walked out of my first prenatal with a homebirth midwife, I knew this was something to which everyone should have access. I wanted to find a way to make midwifery care more accessible to the Northern Neck of Virginia. It would be a big task, as the area presents special challenges. The only hospital on the Northern Neck closed its labor and delivery unit in 2004. A standalone birth center opened in 2010, but closed the next year due to financial challenges.
This post is only available to members. To purchase an online membership, go
here.
If you are already an online member
login here.
Read more…. My Winding Path to Midwifery
A Butcher’s Dozen by Nancy Wainer VBAC. A victory and a relief for most of the women who have one. A deep and generous healing for many of them. And still, very much a sham, because most of the women never really needed to be cut in the first place, so they didn't really need to be VBACs after all. Read more…. A Butcher’s Dozen
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 73
Throw out the rule book.
Barbara Harper
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 88
…in feeding babies, two substantial mammary glands are more useful than the two hemispheres of a professor’s brain.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 85
It was a natural consequence that all obstetric procedures had their indication widened as their relative safety became established. But that any operation, because asepsis makes it reasonably safe and anesthesia keeps the patient quiet during its performance, should be so inordinately broadened in its scope that the suspicion is evidence that it is being done for the convenience and conservation of time of the operator, is a travesty on scientific endeavor.
H. Schwarz, MD. 1919
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 71
An Impulse to Soar: Quotations by Women on Leadership, compiled by Rosalie Maggio
Leaders have a passion and they have a picture or vision at some distance from the current reality. They use their passion to move them toward that vision, whether it’s something for their company, for themselves or for their cause.
Sandy Linver
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 72
The greatest use of a life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
Anne and Ray Ortlund
Tricks of the Trade
Midwifery Today Issue 91
Women’s bodies have their own wisdom, and a system of birth refined over 100,000 generations is not so easily overpowered.
Sarah Buckley
Stop Cutting by Jane Beal Others have made this point before, but it bears repeating: Female genital mutilation takes place in the developed world on a large scale in the form of medically unnecessary episiotomies and caesarean sections, or what could be classified as FGM Types 5 and 6. Read more…. Stop Cutting
Go to the Store Home
Birth Lessons from a Chicken Who would guess that the advice from “experts” on chickens’ ability to hatch eggs parallels that of the advice of childbirth “experts.” This cute article shows how nature knows best. Read more…. Birth Lessons from a Chicken
Traditional Postpartum Practices and Rituals in Iran 
